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imagination in Biographia Literaria, as defined by the later disciples of that cult – senior academicstrained in a literary tradition that was largely based on Coleridgean principles. 22III. Pictures in the MindIn order to develop a better appreciation of Wordsworth’s understanding of imagination, it isnecessary to turn to classical concerns with phantasiae rather than ‘romantic’ concepts of ‘the creativeimagination’. In Chapter 11 I will be referring to Cicero’s understanding of phantasiae in hisAcademica, and in Chapter 12 I discuss Quintilian’s appreciation of the term in De InstitutioneOratoria. For now I turn to M.W. Bundy’s study of the topic in The Theory of Imagination inClassical and Medieval Thought, published in 1927, in order to provide a more general background tothese initial concerns about Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s respective understanding and experience of‘imagination’.Bundy’s classic analysis developed out of an initial concern to define the history of the meaning of theterms ‘Imagination’ and ‘Fancy’ in preparation for a planned work on the English Romantic Poets andtheir theory of imagination. But as Bundy discovered the complexity of the subject, his preliminaryinvestigations grew into a much larger historical study, one that then became his main focus. Hisplanned study on Romantic theories of the imagination was never written. In describing his initialresearch Bundy wrote:The writer had anticipated a study of the obvious German philosophers, of the English criticsof the eighteenth century, and of the Swiss aestheticians. He soon found himself, howeverengaged in a quite different study, for Coleridge sent him to the study of the psychology of theMiddle Ages, Wordsworth sent him to the entire English Empirical tradition, and Blake to themystics; and these in turn inevitably directed the attention to those great classical philosophiesin which the concepts of ‘appearance’ and ‘image’ were first defined, – to the systems ofPlato and Aristotle, the Stoics and the Neo-Platonists. (7)My own investigations into Wordsworth’s understanding of ‘imagination’ have likewise ledback to the ‘great classical philosophies in which the concepts of ‘appearance’ and ‘image’ were firstdefined’, rather than the ‘obvious’ eighteenth century European influences. And it is in thephilosophical principles of Aristotle and the Stoics, in particular, that I have found the influences thathelped shape Wordsworth’s beliefs about imagination. Plato and the Neo-Platonists form another,differing axis of enquiry, one more appropriate for the definitions set out in Coleridge’s mind. It is infollowing the Platonic axis that most Romantic critics have attempted to track the influences of earlierthinkers on Coleridge’s ideas about Imagination – it is the path he led them down as he recorded hisown enquiries; the path travelled also by the early church fathers. This necessarily involvesColeridgean-orientated critics in the kind of extensive study of intellectual concepts that Bundy was22 In Originality and Imagination Thomas McFarland relates that ‘ a favourite question in viva voceexaminations was a request to distinguish Coleridge’s conceptions of primary imagination, secondaryimagination, and fancy: and the ritual answer, which invariably satisfied the examiners in full, was to simplyrepeat the puzzling words (90-1).107